Visiting the Coutauld Gallery over the weekend (a couple of weekends ago now - this should have gone up before) I 'got' Cezanne, or felt like I did, for the first time. Cezanne, for me, has always had an aura about him as the philosopher's artist (specifically, Merleau-Ponty's). As a philosophy undergraduate who knew only this, but couldn't get any visceral purchase on his work, even after reading Merleau-Ponty's essay '
Cezanne's Doubt', I always felt intimidated by it, and this probably obscured it from me even further. The short, grouped, sloping brush strokes in a lot of the paintings didn't cohere, yet at the same time were too solid, not gesticulatory enough to leave the eye free to impart movement to the images, as paintings by other impressionists and post-impressionists did. I was so frustrated by my sense of wholly missing something, and something
important, that I nearly chose to write my undergraduate thesis on M-P and Cezanne, in order to get at what it was I wasn't getting. Walking into the second room of the Courtauld, though, not yet really properly tuned in to looking at pictures, this one grabbed hold of me before I'd had a chance to think about it.
The painting shows a view of a footpath running along the banks of a wooded pond, and was painted while Cezanne was visiting Pissarro in Osny. This reproduction inevitably doesn't do the painting justice, but what is especially muddied is the deep glittering clarity of the water, and the weight of the shadows in the foreground, which give the painting much more of a layered property than is clear here. The depth - as I wandered into the room, I dropped into the painting's planes, and didn't want to clamber out. Now I shall have to go back and read Merleau-Ponty again. I know that probably nothing I've written here suggests that I've 'got' Cezanne at all: it would be better to say that a Cezanne got me.
The Courtauld is my favourite gallery in London, despite its being next door to King's. Samuel Courtauld played a vital role in the reception of Cezanne in Britain. Cezanne was controversial in England in the 1920s. In May 1922 the Burlington Fine Arts Club mounted an exhibition, 'The French School of the Last Hundred Years', which brought about a significant change in attitudes towards the post-impressionists, and Cezanne in particular. It was here, apparently, that Courtauld was 'converted' to Cezanne's art, describing how 'at that moment I felt the magic, and I have felt it in Cezanne's work ever since'. It was uncanny reading of Courtauld's conversion just after experiencing my own. Another modernist encounter (Courtauld's, not mine), perhaps not quite up there with Eliot's poking at people with his umbrella during the premier of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, but still telling.
Much much more to be said on this, and much better, but as ever, the thesis calls.
